A big week for jQuery
#769 — January 20, 2026
JavaScript Weekly
jQuery 4.0 Released — 20 years on from its original release, the ever-popular (in terms of actual usage) library reaches 4.0 with a migration to ES modules (compatible with modern build tools) along with dropping support for IE 10 and older. With jQuery being a popular guest in our newsletters in the early years, it’s fantastic to see it pop back for a quick visit.
Timmy Willison
💡 If you’re using jQuery, you’ll find jQuery Migrate, an official tool to help you upgrade, useful. jQuery in 2026 is a somewhat legacy choice, though, and you might not need jQuery at all..
Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps — SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.
SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor
Astro is Joining Cloudflare — Big news in the Web framework space as the team behind the popular Astro framework (the beta of v6.0 is now available) is headed to Cloudflare. Few major frameworks are now not under the wing of a larger entity.
Schott and Irvine-Broque
IN BRIEF:
🕒 Temporal Playground is an online sandbox for playing around with the Temporal API.
Svelte has released patches for five vulnerabilities affecting the Svelte ecosystem.
🤖 Ryan Dahl, creator of both Node.js and Deno, says on X that “the era of humans writing code is over” and “That’s not to say SWEs don’t have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.” I hope not, but these are interesting times!
RELEASES:
Electron 40.0 – The popular cross-platform desktop app framework upgrades to Chromium 144, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1.
Node.js v25.4.0 (Current) – require(esm) is now marked as stable.
React Native Windows 0.81, Aurelia 2 RC, Deno 2.6.5
📖 Articles and Videos
ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels: A Deep Dive Into ASCII Rendering — Alex digs deep into getting ASCII-based graphics rendering just right with JavaScript, complete with examples of the algorithms used and numerous demos. The neatest technical blog post I’ve seen so far this year.
Alex Harri
JavaScript Now a First-Class Citizen in Aspire — Aspire is a Microsoft framework for orchestrating the deployment of distributed apps. Originally just for .NET, Aspire 13 now makes JavaScript a first-class citizen, so you can run Vite and full-stack JS apps with service discovery, telemetry, and production-ready containers.
Microsoft
Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.
Wallaby Team sponsor
Introducing the <geolocation> Element — Chrome 144 introduces a new <geolocation> element for requesting user location data, moving away from a JavaScript-triggered prompt.
Viana, Le, Steiner
📄 Bootstrapping Bun – “My journey running the build system for Bun … without relying on any of its usual binary dependencies — namely itself.” Bradley Walters
📄 Building a Scroll-Driven Dual-Wave Text Animation with GSAP Valentin Descombes
📄 How the Electron Team Improved Window Resize Behavior Niklas Wenzel
📄 How to Learn to Build Apps in 2026 Eric Elliott
🛠 Code & Tools
Starry Night 3.9: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — GitHub’s own syntax highlighter isn’t open source, but this library is a powerful alternative that tries to get as close as it can, with support for hundreds of languages. I’ve put a basic Web demo here to show off how to use it on the Web.
Titus Wormer
Extension.js 3: Browser Extension Development Framework — Create cross-browser extensions without manual build configuration and develop, build, and preview across browsers with a unified workflow. GitHub repo.
Cezar Augusto et al.
Easily Add Image Editing to your Web App — Import pintura, give it an image, and instantly get features like cropping, rotating, and annotation. Try for free today.
Pintura sponsor
React Aria: Adobe’s World-Class React Components — React Aria has a fantastic new site and all-new documentation that really sells the entire experience, complete with interactive CSS and Tailwind examples to get started quickly.
Adobe
localspace: Modern localForage-Compatible Storage Toolkit — localForage is/was a popular storage library that wrapped various browser storage APIs with a simple, localStorage-like API. It hasn’t been updated for years, though, and “localspace exists to bridge that gap”.
Michael Lin
⭐ p5.js v2.2 – The powerful JavaScript visual/creative coding toolkit now includes WebGPU mode as a core feature (explained well here and here).
🎥 Mediabunny 1.29.0 – The TypeScript media toolkit adds support for reading and writing MPEG Transport Stream (.ts) files. Demo site.
Prettier 3.8 – The opinionated code formatter adds full support for Angular 21.1 which was released last week.
LogTape 2.0 – Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes. Changelog.
☎︎ vue-tel-input 9.6 – Telephone number input for Vue. (Demo.)
d3-3d 2.0 – D3-powered visualizations, but projected into 3D.
Convert 6.0 – Small, fast library for type-safe unit conversions.
SuperDiff 4.0 – Rich readable diffs for arrays and objects.
Jasmine 6.0 – Long-standing JavaScript BDD framework.
📰 Classifieds
🔑 Add API key auth to any JS backend. Clerk handles generation, hashing, scopes, and instant revocation. Free during public beta.
Notion, Dropbox and LaunchDarkly have switched to Meticulous for frontend tests that provide near-exhaustive coverage with zero developer effort. Find out why.
🛠️ Auth0 for AI Agents provides a foundation for developers to build AI agents without compromising security or innovation. Start building.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:
🔎 The VS Code team has put together a fascinating blog post about how they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code site using Rust and WebAssembly. You can use their docfind engine for yourself too, and there’s a live demo here showing off how fast it is over an index of 50,000 news articles.
📊 HTTP Archive has released its latest Web Almanac for 2025 packed with raw stats, trends, and observations about the state of the Web over the past year, covering areas like WebAssembly, performance, and ever-increasing page weight.
A developer makes a prediction that Microsoft will eventually discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows-themed Linux distribution.
Things are not looking good for the MySQL project.
